Computer networks and home entertainment networks are beginning to see the emergence of an arbitrary collection of devices with Ethernet interfaces, some hard-wired and some wireless. For example, networks may interconnect a variety of different protocol-based stations or devices, such as in accordance with IEEE Std. 802.3 (physical), IEEE Std. 802.11 (wireless), Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), Ether/DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), etc. In particular, a wireless station attached to an access point may, itself, be a bridge to other wireless and/or wired media. That is, a wireless device may interconnect with a network wirelessly, and may act as a bridge to other wireless/wired devices so those devices may also be interconnected with the network.
In the event, however, that an 802.11 wireless station is also a bridge, it cannot work properly within defined standards of the network. One reason is that the access point reflects all broadcasts (e.g., advertisements) issued by a station back to all stations on the wireless medium. A station that is not a bridge can discard the reflected broadcast based on the presence of its own source address in the frame. However, a wireless station that is also bridge is unable to determine that the reflections originated at itself. As such, the wireless bridges are unable to determine whether to suppress the reflection as its own advertisement, or to learn that a device that may have been coupled to (i.e., located behind) the wireless bridge has moved to a new location in the network.
Various workarounds to this problem have lead to various anomalies in the behavior of the network. For instance, there may be extended losses of connectivity (e.g., five minutes), where no such loss would occur in an all-wired network. Also, there may be excessive flooding of unknown frames (causing possible loss of quality guarantees), as well as duplicate delivery of multicasts and/or flooded unicasts in situations where there would be none in an all-wired network. Certain proprietary protocols may be used to overcome these issues, such as the successive transmission of broadcasts from the access point individually to each wireless station, instead of one broadcast to all stations. However, such proprietary protocols do not conform to industry standards (e.g., IEEE standards), and thus are not widely available to networks other than those executing the specific proprietary protocols.